(CN) — Weekend elections saw the Caucasus nation of Georgia yanked off its course toward the West after the Kremlin-friendly ruling party declared victory in a parliamentary ballot widely rejected as fraudulent.
On Monday night in the capital Tbilisi, the first large-scale protest formed outside the Georgian parliament after opposition forces, including the country’s pro-Western president, accused the ruling Georgian Dream party of stealing the Saturday election. Protests promised to intensify and potentially turn violent.
“Your vote was stolen and they tried to steal your future as well,” Salome Zourabichvili, the Georgian president, told thousands of protesters, many of them waving European Union and Georgian flags. “But no one has the right to do that and you will not allow it.”
Georgia, a nation of 4 million people, is among a handful of former Soviet republics lying outside the European Union and NATO at the center of a power struggle between Russia and the West.
This election marked another traumatic turn in the country’s recent history. Since it gained independence with the breakup of the Soviet Union, Georgia has been rocked by a civil war, ethnic conflict, deep corruption and poverty, a mass uprising in 2003 and a Russian invasion in 2008 that left the country partitioned.
Saturday’s election was a major blow to the Western alliance and to pro-Western factions inside the country. The fear is Georgian Dream will become even more hostile to the West and authoritarian as it moves Georgia deeper into the orbit of Moscow and Beijing.
In its rhetoric, Georgian Dream says it is committed to joining the EU, an aspiration included in the constitution, and NATO. Last December, the EU formally opened negotiations with Tbilisi over membership and NATO says it wants it in the military alliance.
But political observers say Georgian Dream’s actions — including recent raids on the homes of two Atlantic Council think tank members in Georgia — belie its rhetoric about wanting to join Western institutions.
“They say one thing, but they do the opposite,” said David Matsaberidze, a political scientist at the Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, in a telephone call.
“They are copying and pasting one-to-one all the legislative initiatives Vladimir Putin has implemented in Russia,” he added. “They are gradually taking Georgia away from the West and bringing it closer to Russia, although they will not say this openly to the audience because the anti-Russia movement is really strong in Georgia.”
After Saturday’s election, European and American leaders called on Tbilisi to investigate allegations of vote rigging. As punishment, Western leaders may consider imposing economic sanctions on Georgia and freezing the country’s bid to join the EU.
Georgia’s election commission said Georgian Dream picked up 54% of the vote, enough to secure a majority in the Parliament of Georgia. The party has been in power since 2012, when it was celebrated for ousting the United National Movement, a party led at the time by Mikheil Saakashvili, a former scandal-ridden Georgian president who’s serving a six-year prison term for abuse of power and an assault on a rival politician.
But political experts and opposition parties doubted the results, citing polling data showing support for Georgian Dream topped at 40%. A collection of pro-Western opposition parties had hoped to join forces and oust Georgian Dream, led by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili.
Opposition politicians refused to recognize the vote and said they would not take their seats in Parliament until independent probes are conducted into the election results.
“The majority of our society is in shock,” said Alexandre Kukhianidze, a political scientist at the Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. “People believe that the Western-oriented opposition won this election, but it was massively falsified.”
He said the introduction of new electronic voting machines for this election likely allowed officials to falsify the votes, and that election fraud also included buying votes and intimidating public workers into voting for the ruling party.
“I’m not surprised that they massively falsify elections,” he said, speaking by telephone from Tbilisi. “This group has quite a rich experience with electoral fraud, falsifications.”
He said there was ample evidence the previous parliamentary elections won by Georgian Dream in 2020 also were rigged.
He doubted Georgia’s courts and legal authorities could be relied on to properly verify the election results due to deeply entrenched corruption.
“It’s a mafia which has captured the state,” he said. “Who will investigate? Nobody. Nobody will be jailed.”
He said the country’s high courts, police, interior ministry and other legal bodies are run by Ivanishvili’s cronies and allies.
Other political experts Courthouse News spoke with expressed similar views.
“These results were changed and reordered at the level of the central election commission,” said Zarina Burkadze, a political scientist at the Ilia State University in Tbilisi, in an email.
She said polls suggested Georgian Dream would win about 32% of the vote and that opposition parties would jointly accumulate more votes than the ruling party.
She said discontent with Georgian Dream has been growing with anger spilling over this spring after it adopted a law targeting foreign-funded organizations. The law’s passage sparked mass protests that were met with a harsh police reaction.
Kukhianidze expected police to brutally crack down on a new round of mass protests and that Georgian Dream will not back down from its pro-Russia direction.
“They will just use the police, riot police; they will use gas, tear gas; they will use these water machines [on people]; they will beat people; they will use rubber bullets against people; but they will not change their position,” he said.
However, he doubted there is enough anger in Georgian society for events to lead to an overthrow of the government: “There is no revolutionary situation now in Georgia.”
Instead, he said Georgian Dream will move the country further away from the West and deeper into the Russian sphere.
“If you look at their propaganda, you don’t see any difference between Russian and Georgian propaganda,” he said. “Everything is clear now, black and white, they took the side of Russia.”
Georgian Dream also has succeeded in shoring up support by cracking down on bribe-taking by mid-level officials, such as police, and keeping the country’s economy on track, experts said.
Matsaberidze said Georgia’s economic situation is stable in part because of Georgia’s openness toward Russia and China. He said the government’s economic policies and subsidy programs have won support among rural voters, for instance from wine makers keen to sell their products in Russia. Georgia has not imposed sanctions on Russia, defying demands to do so by the West.
“Rural areas are dependent on the government in terms of bureaucracy,” Matsaberidze said. “They can easily buy the hearts and minds of that electorate.”
In this election, Georgian Dream also won votes by portraying its friendly stance toward Russia as a strategy to avoid war with its belligerent northern neighbor. Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and its troops still occupy two breakaway regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
By contrast, Georgian Dream said a win by the opposition parties would drag the country into war with Russia.
“Their slogans and propaganda against the war worked,” Kukhianidze said.
He said the party’s message resonated with many Georgians who remain skeptical about Western commitment to Georgia in the wake of events in 2008. Shortly after the invasion, Western powers resumed trade relations with Russia “as though nothing had happened,” he said.
“The West forgot about Georgia,” he said.
Also, in watching the war in Ukraine, he said many Georgians have been let down by Western powers due to their reluctance to give Ukraine the weapons that might defeat Russia. Most recently, he cited the refusal by Washington to allow Ukraine to strike targets deep inside Russia for fear of igniting a wider war.
“A lot of Georgian citizens think: ‘OK, it’s better for me to have peace even if we are turned toward Russia than to have these destroyed Georgian cities like Mariupol and many other cities of Ukraine,’” he said.
“So, a part of responsibility for what happened in Georgia lies with the West too,” he said.
Despite this election setback, he said Georgia will remain on the path toward the West because its younger generations are wary of Russia and are Westward looking.
“Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a whole generation of young people was born and grew up in an atmosphere with Russia trying to conquer Georgia,” he said. “A lot of young people traveled to the West; thousands of students graduated from the best American and European universities: they follow a Western way of life, and of course it’s not the end of this story.”
But Matsaberidze wasn’t so optimistic.
“If the Georgian Dream will maintain power, it will stay in the majority for the next four years until 2028, so that means the European dream is over, absolutely,” he said. “It’s going to be like Putin’s Russia.”
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.